The medical profession often needs to have an objective assessment of the health of the tissue of a patient. The patient may have suffered tissue damage as a result of accidental or deliberate trauma as for example during a surgical operation. The patient may also be suffering some other more persistent irritation as a result, for example, of being confined to bed which can lead to bed sores. It is valuable for a medical practitioner to be able to tell in advance the type of treatment that would benefit the patient.
It is well known, for example, that early detection of tissues displaying pre-cancer or cancer modifications is important for successful medical treatment. We have already disclosed an apparatus and method for carrying out this detection in patent application Ser. No. 08/332,830, assigned to the same assignee as the current invention.
Between uses probes can be disinfected by soaking in a suitable solution. For many patients this procedure is not acceptable. They require that the probe has not previously been used on other patients for fear of cross-contamination and infection. This requirement can be achieved by equipping the probe with a discardable, sterile sheath. Such an assembly must ensure that no part of the probe which is used on a patient could have come in contact with a previous patient. Sheaths that have been designed for other types of probes lack features that would make them suitable for use on a probe that performs both optical and electrical measurements while it is scanned over the surface of the cervix. For example ultrasonic probe sheaths would not be suitable. In particular they do not have provision to make simultaneous optical and electrical measurements. The particular difficulties that have been overcome by this invention arise from the fact that the both electrical and optical measurements are to be performed on the same area of tissue. It is therefore not feasible to install a simple sheath such as a condom over the tip of the probe. Such a sheath may, for example, enable some optical measurements to be made but would prevent electrical contact being made with the tissue with the optically transparent cover in place.